I almost wish I had never been invited to the Jay-Z/Beyoncé wedding last week.
Sure, it was glamorous, exciting, and rather exclusive. But with all the fuss I ended up neglecting this diary for a couple of days, and when I had a chance to turn back to it I found--after nearly a hundred daily entries--that I just wasn’t in the mood anymore.
I realize it’s unusual for a blog to suddenly peter out like this, but I hope you understand.
Alan Horn
You read a lot about prices going up and the climate getting warmer, but you never hear much about people getting uglier.
I realize it's depressing, but ignoring the problem isn't going to make it go away. Is everybody afraid of hurting everyone else's feelings, or what?
I know that my struggle to adopt the freegan lifestyle will not be easy. But when I consider that the impact of my personal budget on the fate of our society and the planet itself cannot be overestimated, I realize I can do no less.
Even so, dumpster-diving isn’t the kind of thing one jumps right into. So I have decided to work my way up to it, starting with cigarette-scrounging.
I’ve been at it for a few days now. You can find a lot of butts in front of restaurants, bars, and office buildings nowadays, but most of those have been smoked down to the filter. Whereas many of the ones you see at bus stops have been smoked only halfway or not even that far, depending on how long after they were lit the smoker’s bus pulled up. It's a fact that most people won’t carry a cigarette around with them after it’s been put out no matter how much unsmoked tobacco is left inside it. Such a shame what people will throw away in this society.
Granted, it takes me the better part of the day to assemble the equivalent of my usual pack and a half, but frankly I can’t think of anything I might be doing that could be more important. Not only am I striking a blow against world capitalism, I’m helping myself at the same time. Every dollar I save is one I can put toward my ketamine habit.
I know that April Fools' Day is an old tradition and a lighthearted one, but that doesn’t mean it may not also be a dangerous one.
In this age of Jayson Blair and James Frey, of novelists pretending to be transsexual teenage hustlers and memoirists pretending to be former street-gang members, I think it is time to stop sending the message that fraud is a frivolous matter.
Is Scarlett Johansson Jewish? I wasn't sure so I looked it up online. Several sites said yes, but I don't know if I can trust them. Many people believe that everyone is Jewish (i.e., Hitler was Jewish), just as there are many people who feel that everyone is gay (i.e., Hitler was gay).
Personally, I wish that everyone were gay except for me and Scarlett Johansson.
Returning home rather late last night, I found my front door ajar, my apartment ransacked, and some deranged verses scrawled on the wall, helter-skelter-style, in what I first took to be blood but on further examination have determined to be oxblood shoe polish. They read:
He is excessively thin
and he is excessively tall
and his head is excessively heavy
so it hangs to the ground like a ball.
His teeth can reach nothing but dandelions
on which he excessively feeds
as he stumbles through the park all day:
is this where the road of excess leads?
Fortunately no one was hurt, and nothing of much value was stolen or tampered with. The most serious damage is to the walls. I can't decide whether to try to paint over the scrawlings, which would require at least two coats, or to redo the whole place in oxblood.
At some point this evening between 8:30 and 11 o'clock a blank envelope containing the following cryptic communication was slipped under my front door:
It is useless to cajole and flatter
the pubescent water nymphs of the mind
and to praise their lovely white feet
and tell them that you love them only
and that you will love them forever.
It is useless because their lovely white feet
will never splash at the edge of the water.
The note is unsigned. What can this mean?
Had some trouble getting to sleep last night, so I doubled my usual dose of Ambien.
When I woke up this afternoon I found three empty boxes of Cheez-Its on the kitchen table and, printed in precise block letters on a legal pad next to them, the following lines:
All ridiculous hats are remarkable,
but all remarkable hats are not ridiculous.
A ridiculous hat is a hat whose appearance
invites general ridicule.
A remarkable hat is a hat whose appearance
attracts general remark.
To ridicule is to remark,
but to remark is not necessarily to ridicule.
All ridicule remarks,
but not all remarks ridicule.
All hats whose appearance
invites general ridicule
are remarkable,
but not all hats whose appearance
attracts general remark
are ridiculous.
All ridiculous hats are ridiculous
and no ridiculous hats are unremarkable.
All remarkable hats are remarkable,
but some remarkable hats are not ridiculous.
Therefore,
all remarkable hats are not ridiculous,
but all ridiculous hats are remarkable.
My dark night of the soul continues.
I call my mother to ask if she still has my Snoopy nightlight.
She doesn’t.
Old people are basically tourists. They're here, you see, but they're not from here.
The language here is the same as where they're from, but it's spoken differently and can be hard to understand. Things cost more here, which is hard for them to get used to, too. Customs are different, and the way people dress, and the things on TV, for the most part. Although sometimes they will catch a program that reminds them of home, like when we flip the channels in a hotel room in Lima and find Lost.
They speak to us sometimes like Ugly Americans in a third-world country--loudly, over-distinctly, slightly contemptuously, trying their best to make us understand. And sometimes, being old, they get confused and start thinking we're the ones from somewhere else and that we're taking over the place, like summer people during the season.
But they're the transients. They never go back to where they're from, however much they miss it, but neither are they stopping here for good.
I am presently in the midst of what can only be described as a dark night of the soul. Sounds dramatic, I know, but we all go through these periods from time to time, and we all have our own ways of coping when we do. Mine is huffing air freshener.
With prices going up and a recession looming, I’ve been forced to make some hard choices. Just this week I reduced the hours of the kid I hire to deal with my MySpace friend requests, making the position part-time.
I do feel bad for all those waiting to be accepted as my MySpace friend, and if anybody reading this happens to be one of them I hope this little peek behind the curtain explains any further delay. Perhaps it will help to know that it doesn’t mean as much as you may think--none of my real friends even use MySpace.
Stopping by the drug store this evening to pick up a few things, I felt a certain hesitation as I approached the check-out counter.
I was conscious of the fact that every item in my basket represented a physical problem of mine. None was especially alarming by itself, but, taken en masse, they shocked even me. Could the woman at the register fail to wonder what sort of person needed products to treat toenail fungus, hemorrhoids, gas, acne, dandruff, athlete’s foot, and bad breath? Would she not be likely to raise her eyebrows when she spotted preparations for both constipation and diarrhea? Surely she would nod to herself knowingly as she rang up the vitamin packs promising to enhance male potency. And so on.
But I was worried over nothing. When she briefly met my eyes to ask me to swipe my card, there was not a trace of judgment in her look. She had seen it all.
Idea for a work of art: haven’t worked out the details, but gist is that the actual subject of work is NOT whatever it represents, but rather the means by which it is represented, and thereby the process of representation ITSELF. (Find out has this ever been done.)
Meeting of the South Brooklyn Vespa Club this evening. A heated discussion of our rivalry with the North Brooklyn Vespa Club, followed by snack (Funions and TaB).
After this break, I put forward a motion on how to respond when on club outings people snicker at us or make derisive comments like calling us “Heck’s Angels.” I proposed that we all have an orange before we meet and save up the peel in the pockets of our leatherette club jackets. Then when someone sneers at us, instead of just pretending like we didn’t hear, as usual, we could all bombard him with our peels. If he tried to retaliate, we could simply take off on our crotch rockets (provided that we have the right of way) and leave him in a cloud of diesel exhaust.
This motion did not win the universal support I had expected it to. But at least it will be forwarded to the policy committee for further study.
Many people, eager to put a face on the stray observations recorded on this page, have been urging me to post a photograph. I’m afraid they’ll have to be patient. My digital camera is not in serviceable condition at the moment, having been inadvertently dropped into a large bowl of bouillabaisse.
I’m hoping to get it working soon, but in the meantime let me respond to a related query I’ve been getting: which celebrity, living or dead, do I most resemble? Well, it may sound immodest to say so, but I’ve often been compared to Orson Welles in his F-Is-for-Fake period.
This talk of bouillabaisse is making me hungry, and reminding me of that trying business at lunch today (or breakfast, I should say, since I hadn’t left the table). I was in a private room of my favorite café, hard at work on an abstract charcoal rendering of my lovely twenty-two-year-old lover Dudu, who was posing nude against the balcony. The light was exquisite. A waiter burst in and, before I could look up, spilled an entire tureen of billi-bi on my little sketch.
“Fils de putain de tete de merde!” I cried and grabbed a gigot d'agneau à la provençale, wielding it menacingly. I did not, however, strike the man, who retreated abjectly. Dudu was laughing, in her cruel way, but I was in no mood to join her. My billi-bi was wasted, my sketch obliterated. Thank God I’d had the restraint to spare the lamb.
Out of sorts, I called for coq au vin, foie gras, pot au feu, crème brulet, and a bottle of cabernet sauvingon. A waiter came running--not the same one, unfortunately--slipped on a steak au poivre that had somehow ended up on the floor beside me, and broke his collarbone.
The presidential candidate Barack Obama has distanced himself from his pastor over the latter's expression of some commonsense liberal views, comparing them curiously to the embarrassing racial and ethnic slurs of an older white relative.
America is not racist. America is not imperialist. Just keep telling yourself that, America.
My name hasn’t surfaced in the tabloids yet, but it’s only a matter of time now that Ted Pedersen has come forward with an account of his own role in keeping the McGreeveys’s marriage alive. I wonder if they ever told him he was only called in as my replacement. They begged me to stay, but by then my relationship with Michelle Paterson had grown too serious. Perhaps it is just as well.
The Spitzers were well aware of my services, too. They even had me over for drinks at 985 Fifth Avenue a couple of times back in 2001, I think it was. But while Silda seemed quite affectionate and open, Eliot sat there staring at the furniture and biting his lip. The consequences--not just for the couple personally, but for our state--of Eliot’s apparent preference for high-priced trysts with twenty-two-year-olds over a purely pro bono arrangement with a slightly more mature but no less desirable participant are now plain as daylight.
Happy to find when I stepped on the scale this morning that I had lost a couple of pounds this past week.
I don’t get over to the gym--or even out of my apartment--as much as I should, but I do try to keep active with a program of constant fidgeting.
Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day, but this year I have learned my lesson. As much as I love to celebrate my Irish heritage, it’s simply too dangerous for me to do so, thanks to a stubborn psychological tic of mine.
My problem is whenever I hear someone crooning the hilariously morose ballad “Danny Boy,” as happens every fifteen minutes or so in an Irish bar on St. Patrick’s Day, I break into giggles. I can usually keep them under control for the first verse or so, but the lines “And if you come, when all the flowers are dying /And I am dead, as dead I well may be” never fail to leave me helpless with laughter.
It’s around this point that I generally get the question “What’s so fucking funny?” After the fourth or fifth rendition, my excuse that the singing is so soulful it reminds me of a clever limerick my Pappy once taught me begins to wear thin.
Idea for a work of literature: story or novel or play or poem (details??) that means nothing, and that (the lack of meaning) IS its meaning. (Alternatively: the point is that IT HAS NO POINT.) (Question: Has this been done before? Try and find out.)
Never fold when you can hang.
Never hang when you can drape.
Never wash when you can rinse.
Never rinse when you can lick.
Never untie when you can slip off.
Several people, speaking to me privately, have expressed a certain apprehension about David Paterson’s promotion to the highest office of our state. They wonder how someone who is legally blind can be up to doing whatever it is that governors do. Aren’t there a lot of important papers to look at, they ask? What if there’s a natural disaster and he is obliged to come and inspect the damage? Won’t he just look silly being led around and shown things he can’t see properly?
I reply that there is no reason for concern. A governor can easily ask an aide to read him any important papers he finds lying on his desk. “What if he doesn’t notice them there?” someone unacquainted with the workings of statecraft might ask. The answer is he can ask another aide, or even the same one if that one's not too busy reading, to keep an eye out for important papers lying around that the governor might need to attend to.
As for viewing disaster areas, it is well known that governors who lose their sight develop a keener sense of hearing in compensation. So although Governor Paterson may not be able to take in much visually on such occasions, he will be sure to overhear many things that a sighted governor would fail to catch, and which may well give him a better picture of his constituents’ concerns than anything said to him directly. He can also be expected to show a special sensitivity to the issue of noise pollution, which is a big one for our state.
What’s more fun than bathtime?
Answer: bathtime on ecstasy.
Checked out a lecture today at the public library called "How to Talk to Your Ferns." I thought it would be a good place to meet girls, but perplexingly enough the audience turned out to be predominantly male and middle-aged. I didn't stay long, but it was worth it just to see the lovely specimen the speaker from the American Fern Society brought in for practice--a lush, vibrant maidenhair. You could tell it would be a good listener, too.
Eliot Spitzer’s real crimes--wielding the slave-driver’s whip against the transit workers for daring to withhold their labor-power, pushing to keep people labeled “sex offenders” locked up long after the end of their sentences, and on and on--only served in this reactionary society to advance his career. Now that sinister career is undone over a piece of harmless fun, and one can’t even gloat about it.
Visited a hypnotherapist this afternoon to help with my nose-picking problem. After he failed three times to put me under I felt sorry for the poor fellow and made like the fourth try worked.
I suppose I should have spoken up when he started going through my pockets, but it would have been embarrassing to reveal my little ruse. A similar sense of delicacy prevented me from protesting as he fondled my inner thighs beyond shifting slightly and murmuring, “Stop it, Sheila!”
Fortunately there are only eleven sessions left. I don’t plan to schedule any more, and starting next time I certainly intend to carry less cash on me, and to wear thicker trousers.
Last night I had the strangest dream sequence.
I couldn’t make out just what sort of a place it was that I was in. It seemed to be a gambling house, but there weren't any walls, just a lot of curtains with eyes painted on them. A man was walking around with a large pair of scissors cutting all the drapes in half.
A girl came in with hardly anything on and started walking around the gambling room kissing everybody. She came to my table first. She looked a little like Ingrid Bergman.
I was sitting there playing cards with a man who had a beard. He said, “That makes 21--I win.” But when he turned up his cards, they were blank! Just then the proprietor came in and accused him of cheating.
I saw the man with the beard leaning over the sloping roof of a high building. I called out to him to watch out. But he went over--slowly--with his feet in the air.
I saw the proprietor again. He was hiding behind a tall chimney, and he had a small wheel in his hand. I saw him drop the wheel on the roof.
Then I was running and heard something beating over my head. It was a great pair of wings. They were chasing me and almost caught up with me when I came to the bottom of the hill. Then I woke up.
The funny thing is I kept thinking that all this meant something, that there was some other meaning in it that I ought to find out.
Even people as spiritually evolved as I like to think myself to be are not immune to middle age and its indignities. I have noticed that my astral body is starting to go a little soft around the middle, while my third eye has grown so nearsighted lately that I can no longer read an aura from across the room.
Putting a call out for subjects to participate in an ambitious new study of the sexual behavior of female college students. My research will by no means be restricted to private schools like Columbia, Barnard, and NYU--CUNY students and others are encouraged to join. Unfortunately, though, my research criteria require me to limit my sample to undergraduates only.
Please don't feel that to take part you need to fit into somebody's preconceived notions. This is to be a very open-minded sort of study and absolutely no judgements of any kind will be made.
Those wishing to join the study are asked to email me at *alanshorn at gmail dot com* with their school affiliation, year, height and weight, two recent photos (face and full-body, please), primary sexual orientation, biggest turn-ons, and astrological sign.
“But the work that really drew me in,” writes Nicholson Baker in the New York Review of Books this week of his experience as a contributor to Wikipedia, “was trying to save articles from deletion. This became my chosen mission.”
Let’s see. Fighting to save obscure articles posted to an online “encyclopedia”; crusading to preserve ratty old newspapers in Double Fold; driven, in his fiction, to salvage the tiniest, most commonplace moments from the flux of living. It all adds up to… something. I have no idea if Mr. Baker is in therapy, or needs to be, but my analyst could do a lot with this material.
Is there any other film actor who can match the charisma, the wit, and the sheer energy of Jack Nicholson? Admittedly I'm not familiar with the entire range of his oeuvre, having only seen him for the first time this afternoon in The Bucket List. Unfortunately, his performance, astonishing as it was, could not completely save that mannered and precious production. But I'm eager to catch up on the rest of his career, and in fact have just added Anger Management to my Netflix queue.
Sometimes I wonder about these people who are running for president. What do they get out of it? What are they really trying to accomplish?
I don’t know why we can’t get answers to these questions. I realize that it seems like the papers are filled with nothing else these days. But most of us know better than to believe anything they print on this subject. So the mystery remains.
Few remember today, but back in 1993 the New York Zoological Society tried to rename the city’s zoos “wildlife conservation parks.” The decision was made after the society’s director noticed that the word zoo had the secondary definition of “a situation or place marked by confusion or disorder.”
They quietly went back to the old name a few months later when it became clear that signs pointing to the Bronx Wildlife Conservation Park meant nothing to people looking for the Bronx Zoo. “I want people to know what they are visiting,” the director of marketing helplessly explained.
I feel we should not have let this sad concession to common sense discourage us. The rampant use of terms with undesirable pejorative secondary meanings remains one of the most critical issues facing us.
For instance, the animal currently known as the pig is not in fact a “filthy, disgusting creature,” as the word is secondarily defined. We should find another term. “Porkchop source”? “Dumpling-filling animal”? These sound more like crossword clues. It may be harder to come up with such expressions than I thought, especially just before lunch. Perhaps readers of this entry will have some suggestions of their own.
In the meantime, ferrets, which unlike pigs actually are filthy and disgusting, should be renamed “police officers.”
Dilemma: If I grow mutton chops to minimize my jowls, will they only end up enhancing my meth mouth?
I don’t think I shall ever be able to pass the corner of 40th Street and 9th Avenue, as I did this afternoon, without thinking back to my days as a squeegee man.
It was something I sort of drifted into, almost as a lark. Then I got the bug and for three wild years my squeegee was no mere tool of my trade but nearly an appendage of my body.
40th and 9th was my corner. I was out there every night in all kinds of weather, along with my partner Lonny. Lonny was one of the greats. The second a driver would spot his hulking, six-foot-four frame staggering over with a bucket of dark gray suds and a deranged look in his eye, the window would roll down and a fistful of change would drop into Lonny’s cup.
Being of slighter build and craftier disposition, I had a different approach. I would come up quietly out of the driver’s blind spot so that I could start lathering his windshield before he had a chance to switch on his wipers. I never charged for this service, of course, but if the driver was kind enough to favor me with a tip, I would do him the additional courtesy of wiping the filthy soap out of his line of vision.
I burned out after three years and never looked back. Soon after that the city declared war on the squeegee men, and today they are no more. The last time I saw Lonny he was sleeping on a park bench barefoot. I often wonder with a little shudder where he is today, and whether he knows it was me who made off with his shoes.
Many people will recognize a threat and get all worked up over it without bothering to take a few simple measures to minimize their risk. Yes, there will always be much that is beyond our control, but there is also a great deal we can do to improve our chances if we are only willing to expend the effort.
For instance, like most people I am concerned about the possibility of being buried alive. But how many take the trouble to carry a crowbar and garden spade on them at all times, as I do? How many will even go so far as to keep a simple note pinned inconspicuously to their clothing listing the tests they desire to be performed on themselves before they are declared dead?
In Neuilly today to gather with a small party in memory of my old friend Alain Robbe-Grillet, who died last week. A moving reading of the description of the counting of the banana grove from La jalousie left everyone a little misty-eyed.
I remember the first time I ran into Alain at Les Deux Magots back in 1959, it must have been. Though I had never seen his photograph I recognized him right away as he was wearing a dark, flat-brimmed hat with a braided leather band no more than one-eighth of an inch in width, the braids of which formed a series of small, interlocking figure eights, while with the head of a match held between the third and fourth fingers of his left hand he was idly tracing on the marble tabletop, over and over, a similar series of figure eights.
All the current presidential candidates say they are for “change,” but this is a vague and empty slogan that tells us little. What kind of change are they talking about, exactly?
There is change for the better, and there is change for the worse. Normally, of course, we welcome the former and try to avoid the latter. But at certain times, such as in the middle of a lengthy public function, we are so bored out of our fucking minds that we long for a change of any sort, no matter how dire.
This is the kind of rigorous, far-reaching analysis we need so badly these days, and yet so seldom find in the mainstream, corporate-owned media.
Many people feel that Holocaust movies are dreary and manipulative. They say that all such films do is exploit a horrifying historical setting to evoke a set of stock responses.
What such people fail to understand is that people in a Holocaust movie audience, unlike people in the Holocaust, are there by choice. If we wanted emotional subtlety, we wouldn't be watching a Holocaust movie.
I bring this up because there is a subgenre of the Holocaust movie that has never received the attention it deserves. The films I am speaking of add to the melodrama and sentimentalism typical of cinematic treatments of the death camps an element of bittersweet comedy. If there could be a more perfectly well-rounded entertainment package I personally cannot conceive of it.
Those who are of the same mind will be excited to learn that I am putting together the first-ever festival devoted to films of this sort (date, time, place, price of admission, and corporate sponsorship to be announced).
While the schedule has not yet been finalized, I am proud to say that we have already lined up three of the finest examples of the genre: Jakob the Liar starring Robin Williams, the Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful, and the world premiere of Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Died.
This last work, though completed back in 1972, has never been released until now. Some have speculated that its auteur’s heavy Percodan use at the time may have marred the production of the film and even its conception. While these suggestions are baseless, as we shall see, there do seem to have been fears for whatever reason that audiences of the time would not be receptive to the film’s merits. I speak for many in saying: We are ready!
The Internet, I find, has something ineluctably erotic about it. I’m not talking about all the fetish porn floating around, or even about those penis-enlargement therapies, which by the way are a complete waste of money and time. It’s not the content I’m talking about, but rather the Internet itself and the feeling it gives of being connected so intimately to so many people.
This state of affairs may go some distance toward explaining certain communications that have come my way lately from one or two readers of this diary. Their nature is such that it is difficult to know how to respond to them directly, particularly without first knowing a little more about the other parties.
But if any of them ever happen to be in the area, I can sometimes be found in the fresh-fruits section of the Atlantic Center Pathmark, especially on Sundays between 2:30 and 4:00 p.m.
Walked by the World Trade Center site today. Hard to remember when it seemed a gaping hole. One appreciates the sense of space. Is there anyone without a financial stake in the project actually looking forward to the new Freedom Target?
If this diary is to fulfill its promise of offering a warts-and-all look at who I am, I suppose it is time to start talking about my wart problem.
Unfortunately, as soon as one tries to open up about such matters in a healthy, straightforward way one instantly comes up against a host of misconceptions and prejudices. Say the word warts and right away people start thinking of witches and toads and Ehud Olmert. The truth is that many people who are not creepy or evil suffer from warts at some point in their lives.
Another big misconception is that warts are brought on by overly vigorous masturbation. There is no evidence to support this belief. In my own case, the warts clearly spread from my hands to my genitals and not the reverse.
News that Fidel Castro has stepped down, as the capitalist press howls for counterrevolution.
So out of all the sinister methods tried by the CIA to get rid of him--snipings, bombings, druggings, poisonings, the famous exploding cigar--the one that finally worked was simple attrition.
My upstairs neighbor is an insomniac who occupies himself at night by slowly dragging all of his furniture from one end of his apartment to the other and then back again. These Sisyphean labors stop only on Saturdays, when he chooses to rent the place out as an illegal all-night bowling alley.
My next-door neighbor subsists on a diet of badly scorched food. It is hard to know whether this is for reasons of taste, health, weight-watching, or simple carelessness.
My downstairs neighbor is a great fan of the Allman Brothers. He is particularly fond of their classic live recording The Allman Brothers at the Fillmore East, which he plays faithfully on weekends and holidays from early midday to late afternoon. Sometimes I feel like I been tied to the whipping post, indeed.
The Democratic Party primaries have been putting me in mind of politics in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh is an untouchable woman. Aside from being the first of her caste and sex to have reached this office anywhere in the country, she is perhaps best known for putting up statues of herself and throwing ludicrously extravagant parties for her birthday at public expense.
The ever-worsening conditions of untouchables in the state, which is one of the poorest and most socially backward in India, have not diminished her popularity among them. It’s as though, despairing of general upliftment, they’ve settled on the obscene aggrandizement of one among them. The statues, the billboards, the diamonds and feasts and rare bouquets for her birthday only enhance the chief minister’s appeal in their eyes. Having long given up on anyone using power on their behalf, much less their partaking of it themselves, their highest wish is merely to see one of their own enjoy it to the fullest.
So it is with supporters of the low-caste candidates in the Democratic race. No one really expects that the actual policies of a President Obama would do anything to lighten the oppression of black people in this country, or that a second Clinton presidency would do any more for women than the first one did.
The pathetic hope is that simply having one or the other of them raised to such an office will in itself give his or her respective section a little more dignity.
Ever wonder what the pictures on your hard drive do in there together when you’re not looking?
This thought has enlivened many a barren hour for me.
I’m too young to remember, having been just a child at the time, but those who were there tell me it was in the summer of 1997 that two unrelated but oddly homologous trends--one sharply ascendant and the other falling just as sharply--briefly met and overlapped.
Before that summer, a person walking down the street by himself in New York City and talking out loud was a schizophrenic. After that summer, the solitary talker was a cell-phone user.
It took the whole season for people to adjust their gestalts. In June it went like this: “I can’t believe such a nicely dressed woman is muttering to herself like that. Wait, what’s that she’s got in her hand?” By August one had learned to check the hand first. Luckily, the headset did not yet exist.
And then, just when people had gotten used to making such distinctions, there was no more need. By the fall of ’97, cell phones had taken over the streets and the mentally ill had retreated, forced out by economics or by Giuliani’s cops (that is, by economics armed).
Or were they? One hopes that they have simply learned, cannily, to keep a cell phone clutched to their ear.